Internet Marketing Blog

We recently made some changes to a client’s AdWords account that reduced clicks, traffic, and spending. Several days later we reversed those changes. Over the next several days, AdWords spending exceeding our daily budget by 20%. This came as a surprise to us as we are used to seeing some slight overage some days, but […]

AdWords just announced that they will soon factor in landing page load times into the quality score that helps determine your ad’s position. The reasons for this are, in effect, to reward site owners who provide responsive sites and punish those that make users wait.
We have no idea yet how much of an impact this […]

Should you advertise on keywords for which you already have top rankings?
This question came up recently with a client seeking to improve advertising ROI and redeploy budget to other, less successful keywords. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume you have plenty of budget so that the core question is whether such advertising brings […]

If you’re running a national SEM campaign, it may be desirable to exclude all local queries so that you can optimize the ad language for non-geographic queries and users. To target specific locales, you could setup additional campaigns that are better optimized for those sets of keywords. The best way to exclude location-based queries is […]

According to recent research conducted by Nielsen, people’s trust of online advertising is significantly below that of more “traditional” media.
“And even though new media technologies are playing a role in ‘globalizing’ society, many purchasing decisions are still based on firmly held national and cultural attitudes.”
Search engine ads rank just below ads before movies and quite […]

We’ve just updated the AdWords Keyword Matching Options Generator so that the output can be consistent with the AdWords Editor interface for importing multiple keywords. Simply check “AdWords Editor Mode” to switch from the bracket and quote notation to the AE’s comma-delimited format.

Microsoft recently notified adCenter advertisers by email that the Microsoft Content Ads Beta would be “available” to all advertisers on August 29. By default, your ads will be shown on the existing search campaign and the new content network. To quote the letter:
On August 29, you don’t have to make any changes and your ad […]

AdWords recently rolled out a long-awaited (by us) feature: Impression Share. Now advertisers can see how much demand there is for their keywords without jumping through hoops with the campaign level “Ad Serving” options. Impression Share is available through the reporting interface only at this time.
Impression Share (IS) shows what percentage of searches that you […]

The bloggers at Inside AdWords recently posted significant information about their invalid click detection efforts. Among the most important points is that the number of “impact” clicks is less than 10% of the total number of clicks, and that this number has remained somewhat constant over time. They also state that fewer than less than […]

The 10,000 lb. gorilla is getting heavier. So says a recent report by comScore. Google sites (www.google.com, www.aol.com, etc.) increased their market share in December to 47.3%, compared to 28.5% for Yahoo and 10.5% for Microsoft.
The numbers themselves aren’t as important as the trends: Google continues to grow, Yahoo grew more percentage-wise and thus is […]